We huddled into what little cover we had. Half a minute later we saw the goose coming toward us. My, it was high. Dad relaxed. A bird that far up is all but beyond the reach of lead shot. Swede soughed in defeat.

“Stay down,” Davy said.

The goose now commenced a wide swing round the field, while Davy melted into that rockpile as if to join it forever. I remember the low angle at which he held the shotgun; I remember his shadowed, patient eyes—he looked ready to burst from cover and chase down an antelope. The odd thought came to me that Davy was hunting alone—that Dad and Swede and I weren’t even there, really; that we existed with him as memories, or fond ghosts watching his progress.

The goose circled the field once, saw nothing interesting, and gained altitude; it might’ve been considering Mexico, it was that high. It flew over the rockpile on its way south, and when it did Davy rose to one knee and shot it out of the sky.

That night Swede and I lay somewhat breathless under a hill of quilts. For drafts there was noplace like August’s farmhouse; you could roast under such strata and your nose still cold as a glass knob.

“What do you think Davy’ll do—about those guys?” Swede whispered, eyes alight. Though I’d promised not to scare her with any Finch and Basca talk, she kept coming back to them.

“What do you mean, do? They’re just cowards, windbags.” An unsatisfactory answer to a warrior like Swede. She jounced a little under the quilts, which let in some cold, and we listened to talk from the kitchen: August and his wife, Birdie, larking through the old stories with Dad. Davy was in there too, drinking coffee with the grownups, keeping his silence.

“You think he’ll fight ’em?”

“Why would he? Dad took care of those guys already, didn’t he? In the locker room.”

Swede said, “Davy thinks they got off easy, can’t you tell? He’s being such a grouch. Boy, I’d hate to be those guys when Davy gets hold of ’em.”

I thought that was awfully bold of Swede on Davy’s behalf—you understand, I would never bet against my brother, but these two fellows were as serious a kind of trouble as you could purchase in Roofing back then. To call Finch and Basca the town bullies doesn’t touch it, as you will see.

“Maybe,” I said, “we just ought to wait. All right?”

We settled, yawned, and listened to August Shultz talk about Doot, his fleet quarter horse in days of yore. We knew about Doot. As kids, Dad and August had been neighbors, only a few miles from here. August would ride over in the mornings and pick up Dad, who’d be saddling his paint Henry in front of the barn, and they’d race the last half mile to school. Though Henry was a dozen years older than Doot, Dad was by nature a flat-out rider whereas August had inherited the cautious temperament of his German forebears. On calm autumn days the dust raised by Dad and Henry would hang above the road for hours; to August’s great credit, he never exhibited resentment about the constant losing. In fact, though August’s judiciousness cost him transient glory, it probably saved his farm any number of times; it probably accounted for his now owning three farms, including the one he loaned us to hunt on every fall. Dad’s family, the Lands, had not only lost their farm toward the end of the Dust Bowl years, they’d never again owned anything like the ancestral namesake. We’d become renters—which was, in our case, about all that the family of a small-town school janitor could expect.

Swede murmured, “I’m sleeping, Reuben.”

“Back to your room, then.” She’d slipped in with me because the room I shared with Davy was nearer the kitchen, the better to eavesdrop on the grownups.

She got up, kissed me, and stood by the bed in her cowboy-print pajamas. “Rube, you’re almost like Davy now, aren’t you. I mean, you shot a goose this morning.”

She meant to compliment me, but the fact was I’d been thinking this over. By the time we left to steal up on that little bunch of Canadas, I’d almost begun to believe I’d taken that goose on account of my own skill—as if I hadn’t blown two easy shots before lucking out on a long one. But Davy’s work on the lone Canada had slapped me awake. I had in my mind, that night, the image of Davy I’ll carry with me always, a picture that is my brother more than any other I might recall. It’s Davy at the very top of his motion—risen to one knee, Winchester at his shoulder, barrel pointing a few degrees from straight up. His hat’s fallen to the rocks behind him and his short blond hair stands stiff as a wolf’s. His right index finger is just whitening on the trigger, and on his face is nothing at all but the knowledge that the goose is his.

Not confidence—I understand confidence. What Davy had was knowledge.

I reached out and squeezed Swede’s arm. “Sure I am,” I said. “Good night.”

Waking past midnight I departed this dream: I was crossing a shallow river that smelled of dying plants, my bare feet sinking in muck, the far shore concealed by fog. Not a sound but the swirl round my shins. Then a breeze touched me. The mist corkscrewed away and I saw the shore. A dead horse lay swollen there, tail in the river. I stopped midstream, my breath gone, and woke gasping to the windowful of moonlight and Davy in his bed snoring, arm thrown across his eyes.

I was scared to go back to sleep. There’d been something worse on that riverbank than just a dead horse, I was sure of it. I’d barely awakened in time! Sitting up I realized, with some relief, that I had to go to the outhouse. Normally I’d have dreaded this, for the usual dark and scary reasons, but this time the idea seemed outright friendly—a chance to walk that vision off. I slipped from bed and pulled on my pants and carried my boots into the kitchen. A kerosene lantern was lit on the table. I took my coat from its hook and went out.

The privy stood next to a leaning corncrib downhill from the barn. I felt better, standing under the big clean moon, and even considered going back inside and trying to hold it till morning. But you know how it is—you might barely have to go at all, but just step out in the cold. Suddenly I had no choice, so I hunched my shoulders and headed for the outhouse, the moon bouncing my shadow off the grass.

Then, nearing the barn, I heard footsteps.

Nothing stealthy about them, just shoeleather on wood. It sounded like a man strolling a boardwalk. Still, the noise raised my short hairs, in the middle of the night like that, until I figured it must be Dad, pacing the flatbed of the old grain truck parked behind the barn.

The steps stopped abruptly—which prickled my skin some more—then continued as before.

By now, understand, I knew it was Dad. You know the meter of your father’s walk. Still, it was the dead of night; the smell of the dream hung around me; all sorts of lunar imaginings had hold of my brain. So I crept up quiet next to the barn and catwalked in its shadow until I could peek round the corner at the grain truck.

Dad, sure enough, was pacing the flatbed. He was praying—nothing unusual for Dad; he liked to walk as he prayed.

Did I say earlier that the flatbed sat up off the ground about three feet? Because I should have; it matters here.

Dad’s hands were clenched and pressed to his eyes; he wouldn’t have seen me had I flapped my arms and flown. His lips were moving. Though he often comforted Swede and me by quoting from the gospel of John, Let not your hearts be troubled, it was plain Dad himself was suffering the labors of a troubled heart; over the business of Finch and Basca, I figured, or over Davy, who clearly saw the matter as unfinished. I indulged in a black thought or two about my brother—snoring back in the house, the bum.

And then, as I stood watching, Dad walked right off the edge of the truck.

I saw it coming—his knuckles jammed to his face, his steps not slowing at all as the edge approached. I meant to rush out and warn him, but something froze me tight. I stood there with my knees locked and my heart gone to water, while Dad paced over the edge.

And did not fall.

He went on pacing—God my witness—walking on air, praying relentlessly, a good yard of absolutely nothing between the soles of his boots and the thistles below. As he went, the moon threw his strangely separate shadow to the earth; a sleepy pigeon cooed from the barn; Dad’s boots touched the tops of a thatch of tall grama growing up among the thistles, and they waved as if stroked by wind. I will forget none of this. Nor the comfortable, fluttery feeling it gave me, as though someone had blown warm smoke through a hole in my center. Dad went perhaps thirty feet, paused, and started back. His eyes were still clenched shut; I don’t know whether he ever recognized how buoyant was his faith that night. But in the sudden quiet—his feet noiseless, hitting nothing—I could hear his supplications. Straining my ears, I was surprised to catch not Davy’s name but mine. Then his bootsole struck the flatbed again and he was pacing as any man does, connected to the solid and the natural.

It might seem odd to you that at this point I remembered why I’d come outside in the first place. In growing discomfort I looked at the outhouse. Getting there meant clutching my pants and lurching straight past Dad—and him walking on the hand of God! I knew what heretic meant, for Swede had read me more than a few bits of gruesome history. A person didn’t like to take chances; there was a willow thicket across the yard, and I took myself there in a hurry.